Video - Northwestern University Case Study Video

Northwestern University - Case Study Video

Northwestern is an academic research university with 12 colleges across three campuses in Evanston, Illinois, Chicago, Illinois, and Doha, Qatar. Technology is really critical for many areas of research. Data is submitted to us, and we also share data with other universities, we share data with government agencies, those collaborations require extra security.

The kinds of data that Northwestern collects really runs the gamut, because of those 12 schools, they all have a requirement to protect the student data that we collect. We also have a medical school. There is patient data flowing throughout our research endeavor with products like Bitglass, we really hope to put our best foot forward in protecting that data that we're trusted with.

Our direction is to always try to do more than what we're required to do. What Bitglass does for us is it kind of pulls together that extension of your security controls to multiple cloud sources. We really are looking forward to working with agentless mobile device management to apply some controls consistently across that environment regardless of who owns the device, where it is, what form factor it is. If you're going to have this type of data on that device, then it's going to have these controls, and Bitglass really helps us lay that over the top of all the other stuff we have.

Our interest in Bitglass is not strictly CASB. We liked the opportunity that we had with Bitglass to sort of develop it into something a little bit more than that so that the endpoint, the source, on-prem versus cloud, all of that sort of just becomes blurry, and what you're really looking at are the data elements that you need to protect.

We were also not just looking for a technology solution, we were looking for a partner to help us with this because we know that we don't have the solution for every cloud opportunity that comes up. You can embrace the use of cloud technologies, you can let the people who are coming up with the agile and the nimble solutions go about the business without having to worry about the securities. Bitglass rocks the CASB.